Trivia / Shortcut to Happiness

• Alan Smithee: Alec Baldwin used the name Harry Kirkpatrick as both director and producer when the film was finally released in 2007 (six years after the film was finished, due to legal issues throughout production) and featuring extensive recuts against his wishes.
• Box Office Bomb: Budgeted at around $35 million, it grossed $605,294 worldwide from its limited release.
• Creator Killer: This is the first, and currently only, film actor Alec Baldwin has directed. Luckily, his career as an actor (he already had a major role on the sitcom 30 Rock around the time this film was released, and later rebuilt his career in film as a supporting actor with Blue Jasmine, Still Alice, and later Mission: Impossible sequels) would push forward unscathed.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: Alec Baldwin's remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster was filmed in 2001 but a series of legal issues kept it out of theatres until July 2007, where a recut version (disowned by Baldwin) entitled Shortcut to Happiness played in a few regional markets in the East and South.
• Star-Derailing Role: Jennifer Love Hewitt saw her star plunge after this film was trashed, crashed and burned. Although her male co-stars Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins would soon move past this flop (see Creator Killer for Baldwin's rise; Hopkins was cast as Odin in Thor and its sequels in the MCU, and also later turned in an Oscar-nominated performance in The Two Popes before winning for The Father), Hewitt herself hasn't starred in a major Hollywood film besides a cameo in Tropic Thunder. Luckily, her television career remained prosperous.

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